Are the Charges Against Telegram CEO Pavel Durov Meant to Lead the World to Outlaw Encryption?

​For days after the arrest of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov by French authorities at Le Bourget Airport near Paris, the world civil liberties community held back.
 
The impulse to rush to the defense of a Russian dissident/entrepreneur was almost overwhelming. Durov had refined his skills with the creation of VK, a social media website that allowed dissidents, opposition politicians, and Ukrainian protesters to evade Vladimir Putin’s emerging surveillance state as late as 2014. After Durov fled Russia with his brother Nikolai, they created the encrypted messenger service Telegram, which allows users not only to communicate in secrecy, but to also set their messages to disappear.
 
Across Asia, Africa, Latin America, and our own country, Telegram enables dissidents, journalists, and people in fear of cartels or abusive spouses to communicate without making themselves vulnerable. So civil libertarians were naturally poised to rush to Durov’s defense. But they didn’t. There was the matter of the 12 charges approved by a French judge this week, including “complicity” in crimes such as aiding in the distribution of international narcotics and child sex abuse material.
 
The many devils in this case lurk in its many details, some of which are far from well understood. At this point, however, we can at least pose preliminary questions. Some answers must come from the French government. Some must come from every person who cares about privacy, including the almost 1 billion users of Telegram.

1. Telegram has a service that offers unencrypted, custom chat rooms and one-way broadcast channels that can accommodate up to 200,000 users. Was it in these semi-public channels that the French government alleges the criminal conduct took place?
   
   
2. Did Durov and his people monitor these large chat rooms and channels? If they did not, perhaps out of a matter of principle, does that exculpate them to any degree?  
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3. The value of an encrypted messaging service is its security. The provision of a backdoor by Telegram to any government would necessarily result in the compromise of Telegram’s value to some of the most endangered and vulnerable people in the world. But the flip side of this is that with an encrypted service there may be no way for even Durov himself to know the content of the messages crossing his servers. Should such hands-off, deliberate ignorance absolve Durov & Co. from criminal liability?

 
We can already highlight at least one aspect of this case that should concern civil libertarians and free speech advocates around the world. Thanks to an insightful analysis by Kevin Collier and Rob Wile in Slate, we know that two of the 12 charges involve a purported obligation of providers of cryptological services to require their users to register with their real identities. Another count declares it a crime to import such an encrypted service “without prior declaration.”
 
Collier and Wile write that this latter provision, which at first sounds like a matter of bureaucratic form-filling, actually implies that “France sees the use of internationally based, unregulated ‘encryption’ service as a crime all its own.” If so, will France get away with criminalizing private encryption services? And if that happens, might this become EU policy?
 
We are already seeing Europe employ illiberal interpretations of the recently enacted Digital Services Act. The EU’s top digital regulator, Thierry Breton, threatened X with legal action if it ran Elon Musk’s full interview with Donald Trump. While Breton’s threat was later disowned by his boss, EU President Ursula von der Leyen, it was still breathtaking to see in Europe today that a powerful regulator believes the European public would be well served by censoring the words of a major party nominee to lead the United States. It is not a stretch to imagine such people also wanting to stamp out private communications. Is France now using possibly legitimate charges about Telegram’s operation to undermine the very idea of encryption?
 
Everyone who cares about privacy should watch how this case unfolds. After all, thanks to Telegram, we know that there are at least one billion of us.